Combining bidirectional translation and synonymy for cross-language information retrieval

TitleCombining bidirectional translation and synonymy for cross-language information retrieval
Publication TypeConference Papers
Year of Publication2006
AuthorsWang J, Oard D
Conference NameProceedings of the 29th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Date Published2006///
PublisherACM
Conference LocationNew York, NY, USA
ISBN Number1-59593-369-7
Keywordscross-language IR, statistical translation
Abstract

This paper introduces a general framework for the use of translation probabilities in cross-language information retrieval based on the notion that information retrieval fundamentally requires matching what the searcher means with what the author of a document meant. That perspective yields a computational formulation that provides a natural way of combining what have been known as query and document translation. Two well-recognized techniques are shown to be a special case of this model under restrictive assumptions. Cross-language search results are reported that are statistically indistinguishable from strong monolingual baselines for both French and Chinese documents.

URLhttp://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1148170.1148208
DOI10.1145/1148170.1148208